Most homeowners already have one or more landscaping design ideas fixed firmly in their mind when they contact Exterior Worlds.   They may have seen visited our landscaping design portfolio and seen the work we have done for other homeowners in neighborhoods like West University, Bellaire, River Oaks, and Tanglewood.  They may have seen photographs of properties in a reputable publication that inspired certain landscape design ideas based on several motifs that caught their eye, or they may be have had a passion for a certain cultural style such as French, Italian, or Japanese that they have always wanted to develop on their own personal homestead.

Regardless of the origin of such inspiration, it is important that you work with a Houston Landscaping Service that can help you more fully develop your landscaping design ideas in a manner that compliments the appearance of your home and helps extend its living space outdoors in a way that fully expresses the core values and subjective sentiments of your own personal lifestyle.

Make your landscape a virtual, organic extension of your home’s structure and aesthetic.
When you meet with your landscaping architect for the first time, try to develop landscaping design ideas that will compliment the architecture of your house.  No matter how small or large your home actually is, it represents the most dominant feature of your landscape, and as such, cannot be ignored.  Any outdoor structures such as an arbor, fire pit, outdoor kitchen, patio fireplace, or special walkway needs to reflect the basic design principles that distinguish your house from surrounding structures. 

The swimming pool in particular is something you should pay very close attention to.  Most swimming pool construction that is done independently from a landscaping plan tends to focus only on making the pool itself functional and aesthetically pleasing.  We see this all the time when we work on older homes that were build in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  The pool looks fantastic in and of itself, but it clashes severely with surrounding terrain and home architectural features.  We commonly have to remodel swimming pools significantly, or rebuild them all together, to harmonize the poll with the surrounding landscape.

Garden design is another area that you should really rely upon professional expertise to help develop.  While you may already have dozens of landscaping design ideas in mind about what types of flowers, shrubs, and trees will look best in your yard, please keep in mind that vegetation groupings constitute forms in and of themselves that either work with or against the appearance of your house.  A good example would be some of the contemporary landscapes we have done in our landscaping portfolio section which required us to plant some very unique vegetation patterns to truly do justice to the unique elements that constituted a particular home’s appearance.

Think form follows function when developing a landscaping plan.
The best landscaping design ideas will develop forms around practical use of open areas.  After all, the more beautiful your landscape, the more you are going to want to go outside and experience it firsthand.  Activities will naturally follow, so coming up with a clear picture of what you intend to ultimately do when you are outdoors will help you more fully develop a plan for development of key areas of your yard.  If your ultimate goal is to create entertainment space, then outdoor structures and special environments will need to be built that support the many activities that you and your guests particularly enjoy.  If you have children, and you are looking to create special play areas and sports facilities, Houston professional landscapers can help you by subcontracting specialists who can design these facilities (such as courts and practice fields) safely and effectively while still remaining ultimately true to the overall landscaping design idea envisioned in the master plan. 

Ornament the landscape to create special space in addition to simply decorating it.
Even something that normally conveys a purely artistic sentiment can play a functional role in the development of your landscaping design idea.  Your Houston landscaping company can help develop special patio and seating areas that are aside just for you.  Here, you can reflect, meditate, read the paper, and enjoy the morning over conversation and coffee.  Fountains and sculptures, though typically categorized as purely decorative, can take on a new, more subtle role as boundary markers between public space, children space, and special, private space.  Landscape lighting can then be installed around these areas to maintain these boundaries during the night as well as the day.  In this sense, one single landscape can be turned into many smaller landscapes; each represented by its own unique features, forms, purposes, and carefully designed ideas